The following is all I’ve learned about creating something for the Miskatonic Repository, Call of Cthulhu’s community content program on DriveThruRPG, using a dissection of how I made and sold my first scenario, Branches of Bone, and a breakdown of the costs and sales. What this is not is an explanation of how I wrote it, or a general guide on scenario writing, for two reasons – 1) I don’t know really know how to write, and 2) there are many, many adventure writing guides out there (I wrote this scenario following one of those, sort of!).
Branches of Bone recently gained the ‘platinum’ badge on DriveThruRPG, meaning 1,001+ sales, joining (I think, as of April 2025) 7 other Miskatonic Repository titles. Being released in August 2022, it took about two and a half years to reach this point. I’m going to lay out what factors I think most helped it do relatively well, as well as highlight difficulties and mistakes, explore some sales data, and give a basic rundown on how the Miskatonic Repository program worked along the way. Hopefully others interested in creating for the program will get some useful ideas out of it.
*Thanks in advance to Nick Brooke, one of Chaosium’s community ambassadors, who provided the extra publisher sales information.
Paying for the Thing
To start, a full breakdown on the costs that went into the scenario. There are also some additional costs that were adjacent to the scenario that I’ll talk about separately.
Direct costs
- Write Your Own Adventure program: US$29.25
- Art: CA$500
- Voice Over (Video Trailer): CA$15.30
- Advertising: CA$50
‘Additional’ costs
- Affinity Publisher: CA$74.99
- Website & Podcast: variable
1. The Write Your First Adventure program by the Storytelling Collective is exactly what the title implies – it’s a little tutorial on writing an adventure. It had a few different tracks, with one of those being specific to Call of Cthulhu. Some of the lessons were quite useful, others less so. As Branches of Bone was indeed my first adventure written for the purpose of making public, the program did its job. But it’s main use for me was the time limit (I think it was 1 month), having a cadre of other first-time writers to talk with, and a bundle of all the completed works. The program has since moved away from the time limit and doesn’t have a bundle, so I don’t think it would work well for me any more. Which is very unfortunate, as the time pressure and the bundle are two of the most important factors in Branches doing well. The bundle seems to have accounted for over 200 sales since release, almost enough on its own to get the print on demand option (more on bundles and discounts later).
2. Covers sell books. They just do, especially for RPGs sold online. DriveThruRPG has an awkward interface and is awash with titles, so you have a fraction of a second to grab someone’s attention with the cover and title, and a tiny little thumbnail of a cover at that. While you can certainly create your own cover and artwork, and for those artist-writers out there, good on you, but for artless hacks like myself, we need to pay a professional.
Linus Larsson is responsible for Branches’ cover, and is almost certainly to thank for the vast majority of its sales. It’s just an absolute banger. He also did three insert pieces, one from the start, and two added in later before it qualified for print on demand. They are all kick ass, and while art doesn’t make a scenario, they certainly make it more interesting to look at, and are helpful ‘advertising’ tools, as advertising is mostly visual online, and it’s easier to show a kick ass picture to hook attention than a text-only elevator pitch.
I also need to point out that when I first published Branches, I included one garbage AI image to break up the massive walls of text. It looked like shite, and Linus’ real art replaced it before print copies were available. As you can see below, there’s no comparison. I’m glad Chaosium made a clear rule stopping the use of AI generated slop in Miskatonic Repository titles.
On the other hand, a fancy cover generally has no bearing on the actual quality of the scenario. The best written RPG material needs no fancy pictures to play well. There are plenty, too many, RPG products that are beautiful but feel like they could have been written on the back of a napkin without a minute of playtesting. More time spent on testing and more money on editing will affect a scenario’s quality infinitely more than artwork.
But editors don’t grab eyeballs (unless they’re hot and you put them on the cover).
In summary: Art doesn’t make a scenario, and the actual ‘scenario’ can (and must) stand on its own, but art most definitely sells a title.
*And this is where I confess I did not have anyone edit Branches. I’ll address that more later, but take it for what you will.
3. I made a little trailer for Branches of Bone, with the only paid part of it being a voice over (by HazmatFTW). A trailer for a community content Call of Cthulhu scenario is extremely silly, but I had fun making it, and I do think it had some impact on attracting attention, as it technically has more views than anything about Branches on my blorg/podcast (more on that later). Probably not enough to make the time spent fiddling with it efficiently spent, but again, I like video editing and hadn’t tried it since high school, so not really lost time for me.
4. Advertising was a dumb idea and a waste of money. A friend suggested a social media / google ad campaign. I threw some money at it and it did nothing but make me feel stupid. The Miskatonic Repository is a miniscule niche (community content) of a tiny niche (Call of Cthulhu) of an already small niche (TTRPGs). There’s no use paying the almighty algorithm to advertise to such a small pool of interested people when there are other ways of reaching out. More on the awfulness that is ‘marketing’ later.
5. While it is possible to make a pdf essentially for free with Word and images with Paint, if you’re wanting to make it look nice you’ll need some sort of layout/publish software like InDesign or Affinity Publisher and some sort of graphics editor. Adobe Suite is absurdly expensive for a non-student or professional that needs it for something else anyways, so I turned to Affinity Publisher and an ancient copy of Photoshop I refuse to let go of. I’ve used Affinity for everything since Branches, so I can’t really pin the cost on it. It’s a nice enough little program, if fiddly and now superseded by its second edition, which I haven’t bought yet. Combined with art, a nice layout is one of the more obvious ways to draw attention. If someone looks at the DriveThruRPG preview and sees a nasty looking pdf, they might not read long enough to realise the actual quality of the scenario. More on ‘layout’ and production later on.
6. In addition to the above costs that went into the scenario itself, I also have this blog or podcast thing. I started it to write reviews, but I also of course use it to spread word of the junk I make too (sidenote, it’s a little weird when a creator also reviews things in the same category – novelists reviewing novels or filmmakers reviewing films is a bit gauche, but hopefully this niche-of-a-niche-of-a-niche we find ourselves in here can absolve me and avoid an ‘ethics-in-ttrpg-journalism’ mob from lynching me). Wherever you are reading or listening to this costs some cash to keep up, but it generally pays for itself.
The last ‘cost’ that went into selling Branches is of course time. I did not log exactly how many hours went into creating and then ‘marketing’ it, but it would be a big number. Luckily, it was fun, and this is a hobby, so I’m not overly concerned about how efficient I was with those hours. The ‘marketing’ was less fun, for the most part, but I’ll talk about that later.
One very obvious missing cost is editing. I didn’t pay an editor for Branches (or honestly, and of my work so far), mostly for the simple reason that… good editors are expensive. This is despite editors being by far the most effective use of money to improve an adventure. If we need to weigh the cost of a good cover or a good editor regarding the actual quality of the scenario, the editor will win every time. The big but is that editing is only obvious when it’s done badly. Good editing is often invisible – a kick ass cover and evocative inserts? Everyone notices those. If you have the cash, get an editor, but if you have a limited budget, you’ll have to make a choice. I’m basic, so I wanted the shiny thing.
*Extra side note. You can also get trade editing with another creator, you edit their work they edit yours. Good use of time and money, good networking opportunity, etc. etc. but I’m bad at talking to people, so I haven’t done it properly yet.
Making the Thing
I’m actually not going to go into the creation of Branches, as there are plenty of more useful and better written guides on making adventures out there, I don’t have any idea what I’m doing and have very little real experience, and the creation process is so extremely varied and tailored to the individual. I could go into how and why I did what I did with Branches, but that feels even more masturbatory than this piece already is, and without the pretense of giving raw numbers from which others can hopefully gleen some useful information.
Selling The Thing
And now, sales. For reference, here are the sales for Branches broken down by quarter.
Between August 2022 and April 2025, Branches sold 1001* copies, with customers spending US$3,928.35, and myself receiving US$1,964.18 in royalties (50% – DriveThru and Chaosium split the other half), with the royalties either staying in DriveThruRPG as credit or can be transferred to PayPal**.
*In addition to those numbers are 20-ish books sold through Chaosium’s Miskatonic Repository / Jonestown Compendium pop-up booths at conventions. More on that later.
**While DriveThruRPG charges a whopping US$1 to withdraw royalties to PayPal, additional fees to get that money to your bank will obviously depend on where you live and in the correct currency. Then taxes.
I’ll go over the biggest points that I think went towards Branches selling relatively well, or that intentionally I focused on, in no particular order.
- Niche
- Presentation
- Discounts: Bundles and Sales
- Self promotion
- Outside promotion
- Community
1. Branches filled a niche, mostly in terms of setting, but also scenario structure. Cthulhu Dark Ages is extremely sparse official content-wise, and also only has two dozen or so titles on the Miskatonic Repository, and very few of those (if any?) focused on Vikings, despite how large they loom over the pop culture perception of the ‘dark ages.’ Branches is also a fairly short one-shot scenario with a pulpy, survival-horror structure. The niche setting attracted anyone looking for dark ages, and the structure gave it a low barrier to entry, making it an easy convention scenario or ‘in between campaigns’ session, as well as attractive to players from more action-oriented RPGs dipping their toes into Call of Cthulhu. Looking at other popular Miskatonic Repository scenarios, I think it’s clear that most of them are fairly deep into a particular niche, letting gravity naturally draw in attention. See Prospero House’s write up of the other Platinum and Gold best sellers.
2. Looking at the highest selling Miskatonic Repository titles, a focus on presentation is fairly common. As said early about art, the visual quality of a title really doesn’t affect the actual meat of the work, and a well-written plain text scenario trounces the most beautiful art-book of an underwritten adventure. But, as a customer poking around an online storefront, fancy art and layout doesn’t only draw the eye, it also imparts a bit of confidence, which may be more important to getting them over the ‘buy it’ hurdle. If the creator has clearly taken the time to make their work look professional, and not just cover art, but the interior layout and formatting, along with the store page itself, then the potential customer can have some degree of confidence the creator themself has confidence in their work.
On DriveThruRPG, you have three ways to grab a potential customer’s interest and inspire a bit of confidence: 1) cover art, 2) product description, 3) pdf preview.
For Branches, once again, Linus Larsson’s cover art goes way too hard for what I wrote, and likely sold the scenario by itself. Additional artwork by Larsson, as well as handouts by yours truly, meant I could pretty up the product description, and I also took care to list as much detail about what was actually included in the scenario, and threw that trailer I talked about earlier in for good measure. Lastly, while I am by no means skilled at layout, I did try to make the pdf visually interesting (even if it falls into the tropey sepia-tone old book look of most modern of Cthulhu stuff) and have a descriptive table of contents and introduction so the first few preview pages of the pdf to grab attention and give the potential customer a full overview of what they would be getting.
3. The majority of sales are through discounts, namely bundles and sales, whether site-wide or seller-directed campaigns. With branches, only 27% of sales were at full price, while the rest were discounted in some way. The site-wide sales are the biggest drivers of sales overall, but seller-directed campaigns can be combined with self promotion to good effect. Or poor effect. Bit of a crapshoot, that. More later.
Bundles are a force multiplier, combining the discounts with extra promotion. If the bundle contains only your own work, it still puts more of our stuff in front of buyer who might have been originally only interested in one thing. If it’s a bundle combining titles from multiple authors, then you both get to reach out to customers who might not have originally been interested in your work, as well as bonus promotion as each author likely reaches out to their own network to show off the bundle.
For Branches, the Write Your First Adventure bundle was a massive boost in the beginning, helping it into the ‘Silver’ seller category (101+ sales) within a month, and eventually selling about 200 copies. As mentioned earlier when talking about the changes to the Write Your First Adventure program, the loss of the bundles is quite sad, as they were a huge boon for new writers to get their work out there.
4. Self promotion, or the dreaded ‘marketing,’ of a scenario is by far the worst part of the whole endeavour. Go on any social media site or Discord server, and see the nightmare of desperate creators trying to get some attention, any attention, for their work. It does work, to some extent, though, and without any of it a title can fall through the cracks of the internet’s fickle attention.
In the first few weeks of Branches release, I went hard on promotion, and it sucked. After two months, I largely stopped, except for sales or milestones, and even then it’s still embarrassing to make posts asking for people to buy your crap. I have little advice on how not to suck at this, or how to make it not feel bad. I can of course say that having this blog made self promotion easier, but it still meant clogging it up with blabbing about my own stuff rather than reviews and other fun things. Yes, I see the irony of what I just wrote.
The only exception to self promotion not being a horrible time is when it’s through your ‘community,’ but I’ll talk about that more later.
5. Outside promotion is tricky and often out of your control. There aren’t that many people out there regularly reviewing Miskatonic Repository content, and the handful that do exist are swamped by review requests. Customers likewise barely ever give feedback. After three years, Branches has a whopping nine reviews on DriveThruRPG and two reviews outside of DriveThruRPG (Taskerland and Reviews from Ry’leh), for a cool 1% feedback rate (that’s not entirely true, as I’ll talk about in the next point). Reviews are a bajillion times more useful than self promotion, so each and every one of those reviews is worth their weight in gold. Or text count in gold. There isn’t a good way to encourage reviews, so all I can say is to whoever might be reading this now, go write a review for something you enjoyed (or hated) recently. Whoever made it will appreciate it. (even if it is negative – those are more useful anyways!).
Another source of outside promotion unique to RPGs are actual plays. These are also difficult to get a hold of, unless you happen to have your own actual play podcast or channel. I was beyond lucky and managed to have the Miskatonic Playhouse run Branches, with Chaosium’s own Lynne Hardy and one of Jackson Elias’ Good Friends, Scott Dorward, among the players.
Chaosium itself does some promotion, though sporadic. They used to release frequent posts about new Miskatonic Repository releases, but those are becoming increasingly sporadic. More impactful, and cool, are the pop up booths put on during various conventions Chaosium staff attend (frequently run by the community ambassadors and cool people, Nick Brooke and Bridget Jeffries) where they sell printed MR books. Creators get sent regular royalties afterwards, and buyers save shipping and import costs and lead times (which can be rough if you don’t live in a country with a printer – *cough* Canada *cough*).
One last, and both most obvious but most out of control, source of outside promotion is simply people running it for their friends or at conventions. The more a scenario is run, played, and enjoyed, the more players will want to run it and buy it themselves. It’s taken a while, but I’ve occasionally seen Branches popping up at conventions without any connection to myself (or even notification), and that is probably the happiest I’ve been regarding anything to do with Branches. People have actually played itt!
6. Community, and I mean actual people you enjoy spending time with enjoying a shared hobby, is the most joyful way to ‘market’ a scenario, because it’s not marketing, it’s just having fun and sharing with people that are genuinely interested in what their compatriots are making. I have my ‘home group’ that I’ve played RPGs with since highschool, but like many others since the Great Disruption, a large part of my RPG time is spent online playing with strangers (or rather, people who start out as strangers). Through a convoluted and inscestious mix of gaming and podcast Discord servers, I’ve gotten to know a village of gamers and creators. I can throw up a post on one server for a short notice game, and have people I’ve never met before, along with others I’ve gamed multiple times with across several other servers, all hop in. Getting to know people across the world, of all manner of identities and personalities, has truly been the most meaningful and enjoyable experience I’ve had with – what I’m increasingly thinking was probably a misstep in technological advancement – the internet.
And when you make something and share it with this little community, people naturally take interest in what their compatriots are making. While Branches has only 11 reviews out there, I’ve heard far more direct feedback, being questions about running the scenario, messages summing up how a session went, or talking with players after running it for a play test or after a convention. And when you know the creator of something you enjoy, you obviously want to talk about and share it – take a look at any of the reviews of Miskatonic Repository scenarios I have on this blog for evidence of that. I started this thing to write reviews (and replays… what are those again?) of the Seeds of Terror series, and from there I started wanting to make my own scenarios.
If anyone asks me about ‘marketing’ a scenario, then I’d first tell them to stop thinking about it like a greasy used car salesman, and instead just go run it for people (you should have done that during a play test first, yeah?), especially people you don’t know yet. If you’re not having fun with it, and players aren’t having fun with it, then there’s a deeper problem.
I hope this can give an idea or two of what to or not to do when putting work out on the Miskatonic Repository, or at least you found something of interest. While this was only about paying for and selling the one scenario, I might someday try to write something about actually writing it – not as advice or a guide, no only because there are many, better tutorials out there, but because I don’t know how to write good scenarios.
